Access Investments-European Union- ROMANIA

Europe's political leaders have spent most of the euro crisis denying there's a euro crisis. A "specific Greek problem", that they'd give you. Irish and Portuguese aberrations. As for the Spanish, that really was hard manchego. Wherever disaster struck over the past two years it was always the member's fault, never the club's. The denialism ended this summer, as the financial bushfire moved to Italy and even began to menace Belgium and France. Sequestered in their conference rooms in northern Europe, policy-makers found it easy to wave away catastrophe in the distant, poorer periphery – but far harder when the second and third-largest economies in the entire bloc were under threat. If the rhetoric and the not-so-faint snobbery have vanished, to be replaced by panic about "a last wake up call" and "a crucial crossroads", the actual policy-making is as clueless as ever. At the last major summit, the one where David Cameron pressed the eject button, little was agreed apart from a restatement of Maastricht rules on budget deficits. Markets got excited about the promise of a $200bn loan to the IMF; until it transpired that the figure had been plucked out of thin air and no one knew where it would come from. Rather less predictable is at what cost to the rest of us. In that respect, what's really scary is just how tribal many people become in the face of bad news. The right wing press here has already gone into xenophobic overdrive, and both here and abroad sound judgement - or what passed for it - seems to have leapt out of the window before it's even had chance to see the new year in. At a time when the World's problems have never needed more co-operation to resolve, everywhere you look nation states are acting increasingly like the kind of blinkered, selfish, short term egotists who stitched us all up so badly in the first place. My best hope for 2012? That when it falls, out of the wreckage of this sham of a global financial system we find the sense to build an economic model that doesn't belong in an asylum. That this will eventually happen I am confident about; when, and quite what pain we'll have to go through to get there, far less so. But one thing is for sure - 2012 won't be dull... I wish good to all of us!!!